Includes bibliographical references (pages 499-511) and index.

Before the bubble -- Maps in the mind -- On being lost -- Dead reckoning -- Urban myths of navigation -- Maps and compasses -- Stars -- The sun and the moon -- Where heaven meets earth -- Latitude and longitude -- Red sky at night -- Reading the waves -- Soundings and tides -- Currents and gyres -- Speed and stability of hulls -- Against the wind -- Fellow wanderers -- Baintabu's story.

"Long before GPS, Google Earth, and global transit, humans traveled vast distances using only environmental clues and simple instruments. John Huth asks what is lost when modern technology substitutes for our innate capacity to find our way. Encyclopedic in breadth, weaving together astronomy, meteorology, oceanography, and ethnography, The Lost Art of Finding Our Way puts us in the shoes, ships, and sleds of early navigators for whom paying close attention to the environment around them was, quite literally, a matter of life and death. " --- page [4] of cover.